


Beneath the Crimson Skies

by orphan_account



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drama, Gen, Modern Era, Multi, Other, Slow Build, Supernatural Elements, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-18 12:47:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21611125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: It's 2019. Tensions in the Wizarding community are at an all-time high, with a new unknown force assailing both Wizards and Muggles alike. Nicknamed the New Genesis Kings, this terrorist organization strikes out against the established order. The NGK's motivations are inscrutable, but their attack on Sydney in 2017 put them on the map. The Aurors have their hands full between the NGK's rise to infamy and the burgeoning Separatist movement within the Ministry. Headed by a man known only as The Eccentric, disorder and chaos have blossomed out of intentional snarls of bureaucratic red-tape. Division and the looming threat of complete societal collapse are mounting.In the background, four Muggle graduate students from America are traveling through the north-western part of Italy when they end up embroiled in something eldritch and unknown. Their lives are about to change forever, and their lives will play a key part in stopping (or starting) the War to come.
Kudos: 2





	1. The 2:37 out of Varenna

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Definitely looking for a better title for this chapter--and will be working on cleaning it up quite a bit.

_The creeping dread that comes from the onset of a nightmare._

_The feeling of immensity. Like coming to the edge of a cliff and glimpsing something bizarre—unthinkable in its vastness._

_There are no thoughts in that timeless moment, save one: a line of text in a moldering, well-loved book._  
The height of absurdity: remembering it **now.**

_"He lies around the house all day long and looks at me with those strange, muddy eyes—as if he’d seen something that had blasted away most of whatever intelligence a cat has."_

* * *

To the crowd who had gathered at the station platform, it was very hot, and very muggy—typical of Italy at that time of year. Cicadas droned in the tall, cigar-like Cypress trees standing sentinel on the nearby hill; otherwise, it was quiet in the lake-side city of Varenna. The throng, eager to board the 2:30 afternoon train, had been subdued by the long wait and the oppressive heat. A few were bouncing frequent glances off of the analog clock mounted on the poorly maintained brick wall, while the rest contented themselves with low murmuring. A melodic siren beneath the clock began to play, announcing the arrival of the train, which was seven minutes off-schedule. All in all, it was the picture of normality for Varenna.  
About a mile away from the station, the gentle and gradual downwards slope of the town led to the glistening waters of Lake Como. Gulls called in an irregular staccato.  
A group of four students stood about with their luggage beside one of the two rail lines. Their expressions were despondent.

“This heat is next level,” a young, dark-haired man said in English, from behind his shades. “Even in the shade.” His voice was gruff, but warm.  
“Definitely the humidity,” one of the young women said, with a sagacious nod. “And it’s only supposed to get worse this week.” She had long, dirty blond hair that she’d let down earlier—a choice she'd regretted. Sweat glistened on her tan complexion, and she was compelled to fidget on account of it. “It said so on Google.”  
“Oh god, Trist.” The other girl regarded her friend with exasperation. “Why did you have to say that?”  
Trist shrugged and smirked. “Better the devil you know…” She pulled out her phone and began browsing. After a moment, she grunted in frustration and put it away. “Service just went out.”  
The other young man, hair so blond it looked white, glanced over his shoulder. The tall buildings stretching down the slope obscured all but a single slice of the lake beyond. His expression was forlorn. “The devil you know, lack of service… This hardly _looks_ like hell, but even if it were, we’d do well not to get _too fired up_ over it.”  
This elicited a chorus of groans from the other three.  
“That was terrible, Clint.”  
Clint cracked a sheepish grin. “Couldn’t help it.”  
“You could, though, is the thing.” The girl standing beside Trist was smiling at him, her long dark hair pulled up into a sloppy bun. "I mean, be real. How long did it take you to come up with that?"  
"Just came to me."  
“I feel like you look for opportunities to make puns, like your mind is always in that _mode_.”  
“Believe me, I don’t share half of the ones I think of. You should feel fortunate, Izzy.”  
“ _Izzy_ , huh?” Her smile was unreadable. He'd never called her that before. "Well anyway, if they're all as bad as that one, I'll count my stars."  
“ _Milano, Milano_ ,” the voice of an unseen conductor bleated over an intercom as the train finally arrived. Her voice sounded weary, and odd. Almost artificial.  
“Ugh, _finally_ ,” Isabel said, loudly, hefting her duffel up on her shoulder with a grunt. “I was starting to worry my perfume bottle would bake again, like it did in Rome.”

Clint rolled his eyes, looking away from her. _And there it is,_ he thought. _There's the inverse_. He could never figure out whether he was interested in her or not. Bits and pieces of her personality nudged him back and forth across the line. Searching his feelings, however, he found that he was still conflicted, in spite of her insistence on voicing every single thought in her head. He was starting to think that her ability to inspire indecision would be what eventually won him over all the way—just because of how unpredictable it ended up being. He liked a bit of mystery.  
Clint rubbed his eyes under his thick, black-rimmed glasses and sighed noiselessly.

The train they were meant to get on was old, its metal rusted wherever it wasn’t covered in faded paint. The only new thing about it was a dated LED scroller affixed to the front, its readout proclaiming the train's final destination. Milan. Just as the train screeched to a shuddering halt beside the platform, the sign flickered and died.  
“Let’s hope the rest of it doesn’t break down while we’re on it,” sunglasses said with a confident smirk. He was tall and muscled, his short-cropped black hair intentionally tousled. Clint chuckled and gave a half shrug as he pulled his suitcase over the first, empty set of tracks. “That’d make for a perfect end to this misadventure though.” He looked up, and saw that Trist had yet to move toward the throng of people cramming themselves into the tired old train car. “Seriously. Don’t worry. After all that we’ve seen and done, what could go wrong at this point?”  
“Don’t jinx it!” Trist said, her expression pained. “Don’t look at me like that—that’s _exactly_ what people say before something bad happens, isn’t it?”  
“You’re so superstitious, Tristen,” sunglasses said, nonchalant.  
“Yeah well, we can’t all be Cool Cool Glasses, Mike.” Though she'd meant to say it in an easy, flippant way, her voice ended up sounding forced. A genuine note of worry.  
“She’s not superstitious. She’s just _a little_ stitious,” Isabelle put an arm around her friend's shoulders and giggled. Clint had mounted up the first stair onto the train and glanced back at his friends.

"What's the issue, Trist? We know all about missing boats. Surely if we missed this train, somehow, our newfound haggling abilities would transfer."  
She shook her head and gave an uneasy smile. "Nothing. It's nothing, I'm just being weird." She didn't want to give voice to the feeling she'd just had in the pit of her stomach. That something terrible was going to happen. The train looked rickety, but she was sure that if it ran like this every day, the chances of it jumping the rails had to be slim to none.  
Michael hefted his pack a bit higher on his shoulder, just behind him. “Y’all are wild. Clint, man, you and I need to hit up a bar or something when we get back to Venice. These girls are driving me crazy.”  
Isabelle pulled a face at him.  
“Clint’s a good guy. _He_ doesn’t think everything we do is annoying,” she said. "Do you, Clint?"  
“I mean, to be fair, we sometimes _are_ kind of annoying,” Tristen said, smiling.

The girls complained intermittently about their lack of internet and cell service as the train took off along the high hillside track. The view out of the left side of the train was dull as dirt—literally. The line had been carved into the side of the mountain, so the only thing rushing past outside the glass panes was hundreds of tons of rock. The right side of the train was also mostly obscured by trees at first, rushing by at an incredible pace, but then, after a short distance, the view opened up.  
And it was spectacular. A short distance from the train, the terrain dropped off, falling steeply down in a sharp but graceful arc all the way to the distant yet massive lake far below. The afternoon sun glinted magnificently off of the water.  
Clint was not sure he’d ever seen something nearly so beautiful before in his life.


	2. Apocalypse Noise

When the sound began, Clint had just started to nod off. It began like a distant siren winding up, or a baby beginning to cry in the distance. But rather than falling off into the same bleary obscurity from which it had come, the wail slowly began to rise in volume.  
Clint opened his eyes, finding that the sound was actually much closer to him than he’d thought. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant, though it was getting louder and louder with each passing moment. He couldn’t place what it was. One could describe it as the sound of a massive steel girder being bent—the shriek of metal on metal deeply thronging against one’s eardrums. But this sound wasn't quite as discordant or painful. It was melodic, and not harsh in the same way twisting metal would have been. Like a song.

In fact, the more he listened, the more he realized it _had_ to be a song. He turned his head, a monumental effort, to look at where the sound was coming from. His eyes widened.

A woman was crouched on the floor of the car they were in. In front of her was an open suitcase, and inside of it... Something that hurt his head far too much to look at. The brief glimpse he'd allowed himself had revealed what was best described as a _something._ A bizarre device made of polished metal that was sitting inside one half of the suitcase. It was clearly the source of the strange music. When he'd turned his head to look away, he found it even harder to move than before.

The pain of the headache was already easing. The song, whatever it was, was soothing away all of his tension. He realized then that he was unable to move even a single inch. He grunted, or tried to, and knew then that he couldn't speak. _Complete paralysis_. Under normal circumstances, the thought would be horrifying. But for some reason, the song was drawing all of his fears away, and replacing them with something else. Excitement. Curiosity. _Power._

Across from Clint, Michael was coming to. His position was better suited to look at the spectacle in the middle of their carriage, and he gave the device a good, long look. It felt like something was grinding against his skull as he did, but it wasn't uncomfortable. Kind of like a massage from the inside. Comprised of interlocking metal pieces, the device was roughly cube-shaped, with what looked to be the extended bell-ends of various brass instruments sticking out of it. Connected to these were several large interlocking gears, and steam pipes. The thing looked as though it had sprung up and out of the suitcase. This should have been impossible going by the sheer dimensions—and further, why put it in a suitcase at all? Looking at the thing made Mike feel unpleasant, as though he were going insane by slow degrees. Every moment that passed, and the song continued to play, it felt as though the pieces were throbbing in rhythm. New pieces of metal, new objects resembling parts of instruments or vague, industrial processes projected out of the mass of quivering clockwork one by one, in a three-dimensional kaleidoscopic mess.

How could the shriek of metal be warped in such a pleasing way? How was it that this machine seemed to pull a melody out of his own mind, something he’d heard before in a dream? He shuddered, trying to turn away from the madness, but found to his mounting horror that he couldn’t move a muscle. He was trapped, his head locked toward the inexplicable thing.

"M-ike..." A voice, maybe Trist's, came from the other seats across the aisle. The woman looked up from the machine, and pulled a wooden rod out of her cloak. A word clung to her lips as a bolt of red light crackled through the carriage. A harsh thud sounded out, and Mike, fearing the worst, was nonetheless powerless to turn and see what had happened.  
The woman attending to the device was dressed in some sort of military gear, with a long, black cloak trailing behind her. The expression on her freckled face was severe. Just under the knitted black cap on her head, Clint could make out a shock of fiery red hair.  
A bump on the tracks caused the whole room to lurch somewhat—though this did not cause the sound to abate. If anything, the sound intensified. The woman winced and looked away, covering her eyes. She withdrew a wooden rod from one of her sleeves, pointed it at the device, and murmured something in what sounded like Latin.

There was a bang, a flash of light, and a moment later she was sprinting out of the rocking train car, quickly vanishing from sight.

But the song was still there, somehow. It reverberated not in the air, but in Clint's and Mike's chests. Like they were singing to each other. Mike could perceive two other sources of the song across the aisle—Trist and Isabel?

The song intensified, reaching a fever pitch, like a nightmare going into overdrive.

Flashes of images. A massive mandala, rotating slowly in both directions at once, taking up all of the visual field.  
Reality crackled back for a moment before dissolving into the Song once more.  
Clint was standing on a cliff-side, staring into the void beyond. Only, it wasn't just Clint. Mike, Isabel, and Trist had... Joined, somehow. They were standing in the same spot, looking out at the same bizarre landscape. Thinking... the same thoughts? There was a crescendo of fear, palpable in the mouths of each of them. A metallic taste of the primal unknown. And then it passed. Was it not natural that they would be having the same... dream? Yes, surely this was just a dream. But who were they? The person standing alone on the top of the rocky cliff knew not its own name, its past, or anything about itself, really.

Reality crackled back again, but more faintly this time. Fear tugged at the merged identities. At last, Tristen's mind, the only mind left that fought the collapse of duality, was quieted. Ego-death had completed, and there was only the Witness left.

Taking up the entirety of the landscape was the mandala, which was also a Thing, a Something too vast and beautiful to behold. Behind the Witness, a group of fractal-beings were _singing_. Singing the same Song that pounded in the Witness's own throat. The Song was building up, desperate to be released.  
The fractals evolved a step. Out of each of their mouths, jeweled, self-dribbling basket balls come pounding out. Vibrating. They jumped into the still air of the lonely cliffside and rushed toward the Witness. It flinched, waiting for an impact, but the jeweled spheres plunged painlessly into the body, only to jump back out again. The body had become permeable, like a soap bubble.  
Thoughts arose in the Witness's mind, as though they'd been planted there. Was it thinking itself, or was someone doing the thinking? It wasn't so sure.

Thousands of details per second were witnessed in pure, detached curiosity.  
"You won't be able to get ahold of what's happening," the Fractal beings thought in the Witness's mind. "Do not give yourself over to amazement. Do not abandon yourself to wonder."  
The Witness seized suddenly, collapsing to the dust and the dirt of the rocky outcropping. The Thing on the horizon gazed down with many eyes.  
"Pay attention," the Fractals thought. "Pay attention to what we're doing. To what you're doing."  
On the ground, the Witness was once again in control of itself. Shaking, four people stood up together in the same spot, as one.  
The Fractals were making objects with their voices. Singing structures into existence, things they were bringing over, and offering to the Witness. More of the self-dribbling jeweled balls, but other things, too.  
"Look at these."  
What was being shown to the Witness was impossible. Not just intricate and beautiful, for the objects were certainly that—but something else altogether. These were alien. Truly alien artifacts—alive with their own Song, their own energy. Faberge eggs from another dimension. Toys one might seen scattered around the nursery of a UFO.  
A fleeting image of the Flammarion Engraving, with the objects visible outside of the canopy of sky. _Miniature celestial engines._  
"Do what we are doing," the Fractals were chanting. "Do it. Sing with us."  
A bubble, rising up from within the Witness's chest. Vision pours out of its mouth. _We can pump it out of our mouth by singing! We can create these objects, too!_  
A sound issued forth from the Witness's mouth. Something best described as an unimpeded glossolalia, a string of random, rhythmic sounds, punctuating the reverberation of the Song behind All Things. _Spontaneous outpouring of syntax unaccompanied by what is normally considered meaning._  
The toys themselves appeared to be somehow alive, and were themselves singing other objects into existence. Soon, the cliff-side was overflowing with strange artifacts.  
"A proliferation of elf-gifts," the Fractals thought, in a pleased way. "Listen to them move, and sing with us."  
The ritual continued under the many eyed being's unwavering gaze. Unmoving, it began to contribute its own cadence to the growing cacophony.

  
Suddenly, clarity returned to the minds that made up the Witness. Fear returned, and everything went black.


End file.
